I shut the door. I am in the black hall.
There is a blacker dark than that of the starless night, there is a blacker dark than that of the mountain. It is the black of this hall. Those were a dark outside that my sense invaded. This is a dark that is invading me, that will fill me, choke me, if I stay in it long. It will drive out from the frail shell of my mind any light.
Black hall, you must be gone through! I press a finger underneath my brow, against the lashes of my eye: I cannot see it. This dark is immobile, so I must move. No gray tinges it, no stir of light. It is packed density. It fights against my knowledge that it is but a hall ... a hall to be passed through, a hall at whose other end as at the end I have entered, is a door.
My will saves me from the sense that this invading black is infinite. I make my hands fumble along the walls: their path is a white tracing that all my body joyously obeys. I fumble at a door. It opens out. And the compressed immensity of the hall blows me into a room, blows the door shut....
There is one window, and the black of the night pours in, gray. I face this window at the room’s far end, and my eyes drink its grayness with an uncanny thirst. This room seems but a bellying out of the hall. At either side of me, blank walls. The room is long, for that single window is far away, or it is very small.
At my side I grow aware of vibrance in the dark: a vibrance near my shoulder, and as tall as I. I force my head to turn. My eyes see nothing. They rush back to the small window whose gray they have drunk so greedily. The window is gone! Was it a window, then, whose light I have drunk with my eyes? They turn again. Fear hurries with pricking feet over my flesh. I want to go back. The blackness of the hall would be balm now to my eyes. For there is pillared vibrancy beside me. Fright turns my flesh into myriad scurrying feet. I turn to bolt. The lock in the door snaps shut.
—I am alone: I am locked into this room with that which locked me in.
The vibrance at my shoulder falls. And my eyes descry a gradual human form picked from the blackness. It is a subtle growing, as if individual atoms of the dark were heightened there, grew gray, grew luminous, and made a man.
He is looking at me, as the gray of his form whitens. He is smiling at me. He moves in the direction of the door, and I turn with him to hold him in my eyes. He stands between myself and the door he has locked.